Grey Knights: Sons of Titan

by David Annandale

  ‘The coward wants to blind us and flee,’ Vohnum snarled.

  ‘No,’ Styer warned. ‘This is not a defensive attack.’

  As he fought to tear the veil of darkness from his eyes, and move his limbs again, Brauner’s voice called out on the vox. ‘We are in the enginarium, lord,’ the old colonel said.

  We. Furia was with him. At last. And with them there, the path forward was clear, despite the flies and filth. ‘Begin the sabotage,’ he ordered, grunting with effort to lift the daemon hammer over his head, raising it high, high, above the sea of insects and squirming daemons. ‘Contact Saalfrank. Tell him to lock on for teleportation. At my signal, trigger it all.’

  It would not be enough to destroy the ship. Ku’gath must not be allowed to retreat into the warp on his own terms. He had to be imprisoned there once more.

  Styer brought the hammer down with his full strength. It sent a shockwave through the nurglings and flies. The world flashed blue. He parted the sea of disease. The way forward to Ku’gath was clear.

  The squad fired as one. Bolter shells, the incinerator’s flame and psilencer bolts slammed into the corpulent daemon. Ku’gath snarled and his body shrank back from the blows.

  ‘We will teach you worse than pain, abomination,’ Styer shouted. Still firing, he sprang forward.

  So did Ku’gath. The daemon leaned forward. Its throne slid down the mound of nurglings and rushed towards the Grey Knights on the undulating carpet of bodies. It came too fast for something so huge, propelled by the will of the Plaguefather. It moved at the speed of contagion.

  The throne and the squad collided. Styer took the full brunt of the impact. He was struck by a racing mountain. Sheer mass mocked faith and strength. He was sent flying backwards and landed several metres back. The hordes fell upon him. He shook them off as he rose to his feet.

  The rest of the squad was stunned. Only Gared moved forward. He aimed the Dreadknight’s psilencer at Ku’gath, point-blank.

  Ku’gath held Borsam in both hands. He dwarfed the Grey Knight. He lifted his prisoner before the Dreadknight’s barrel and Gared hesitated.

  ‘Fire!’ Borsam yelled.

  Ku’gath’s expression did not change. He was still the scholar, more studious than enraged. As if performing an experiment, his huge limbs, pendulous with flab, strained. He tore Borsam in half.

  And then, from behind, came one explosion after another. Flames washed deep into the chamber. The wall of daemons was blown apart. Disintegrating bodies came down as toxic slick as they lost coherence. The walking barrage of explosions continued. Behind them came the orks. The warboss had organised a mob wielding rocket launchers and unleashed them all at once. Then it came roaring in at the head of embodied rampage.

  The space descended into an unending eruption of war.

  Brauner winced as the tocsins began to sound. He followed Furia’s instructions, and the two of them shut down security systems and containment fields one by one. The Scouring Light wailed. The vessel was diseased, and now a mortal wound was being prepared in its heart. Corrupted as the sloop was, the event that Brauner was helping to usher in ran against every instinct. He had spent much of his life on vessels being transported from one war-torn world to another. He had lived through more than one void war. He had been aboard stricken ships. The fear of drive breaches had been great.

  He understood the need to kill the ship. His palms still sweated as he turned dials to red and disabled fail-safes.

  He wondered, too, as he steeled himself once more to touch the begrimed control surfaces, how much control they could have over the forces they were setting in motion.

  Furia gestured him over. He obeyed. She handed him an object she had pulled from her belt. It was a melta bomb. She did not let go of the explosive right away but gave him a hard, meaningful look.

  ‘I know that we may well die here,’ he told her. ‘I am prepared. I vow that I will complete our task. No matter what.’

  She nodded and released the bomb. She pointed at the base of the warp drive.

  Gared’s mind and his body were separate entities. His body was suspended in the harness of the Dreadknight. He had no consciousness of it. When the final connections had been made between the mechadendrites and his synaptic implants, his awareness had flowed into the giant armature. Its arms were his, its legs were his, its weapons were his. The small figure attached to its chest was merely mimicking the movements of the great weapon.

  He was the Dreadknight, and it was the Dreadknight that raised its arms in fury when Ku’gath ripped Borsam apart. The flesh body of Gared shouted his rage. The Dreadknight had no voice except force itself. It spoke now. He lashed out with the gatling psilencer and his amplified bolts pounded into Ku’gath. Massive burns blossomed over the daemon’s body. Ku’gath did not flinch, but he did respond. He lashed out, knocking the arm aside. Distracted, he did not see the greatsword slash in from the side. The blade went deep into Ku’gath’s flank. There was a blast of sheet lightning and daemonic flesh parted with a hiss. Ku’gath howled.

  Around his ceramite-plated, adamantium legs, the battle foamed. Gared’s brothers banished daemons by the score back to the warp, but for every one they killed, dozens more poured in through the rift. The tide of combatants rose, the weaker trampled down to become the new surface on which the strongest fought. There would be no end. The chamber would fill completely until there was only Ku’gath, enthroned above all atop a carrion mountain.

  No, Gared thought. No, said the power of the Dreadknight. The heavy incinerator unleashed its flame over the open wound, and the colossal blade sawed deeper. Ichor spewed over the wrist and began to eat at the ceramite coating.

  Ku’gath smashed at the sword arm. The Dreadknight withstood the blow. Gared redirected his psychic energy from the psilencer to the greatsword. He conducted a massive charge of warp lightning through the blade. Forces of the immaterium clashed and huge burn started inside the daemon. It spread. Pus boiled. The sickly green began to glow with incandescence.

  Ku’gath opened his jaws wide. He unleashed the greatest storm yet of flies. The cloud grew until it filled the chamber with darkness. Suffocation and blindness fell upon the combatants. Thousands of embodiments of the jaws of decay fell upon the force field that protected Gared’s body. The strain triggered surges from the plasma reactor. There, too, the jaws gnawed. A million attacks engulfed the Dreadknight. Each was insignificant. Together, they were entropy itself.

  ‘Nothing in this realm is eternal,’ the daemon intoned. The words were not just a taunt. They were instruction.

  Erosion began.

  ‘Brothers!’ Gared cried out, with voice and mind and soul. ‘Give me your strength!’ And he began to chant the Songs of Battle.

  His brothers heard him and they answered him with voice and mind and soul. He became the one and all. He saw all their struggles as their psychic strength joined his war. He was with Vohnum and Tygern and Gundemar and Ardax as they held back the hundreds of plaguebearers that came to add their blows to the Dreadknight’s plasma reactor. They could not see except in the flashes of Nemesis weapons striking daemons. Ardax had lost his left arm, torn off at the roots when the swords of decay had succeeded in chewing through the seams of his armour. His blood was on fire as it fought a hundred simultaneous infections. But he fought on, and he fought with Gared.

  And Gared was with Styer. The justicar was caught in the confluence of seas, between the crashing waves of daemons and orks. The warboss had reached him. Two giants of armour, they traded blows of such force that lesser foes died from their proximity to the impacts. The ork’s chainaxe was so massive that it withstood direct contact with Styer’s hammer. The flies covered both, turning them into silhouettes of violence. In the moments of flame and energy discharge, Styer saw where he would land the next blow. The warboss, even taller than he was, returned each hit with a vengeance. Its armour was
damaged, but enflamed with battle, the brute’s strength grew.

  Stretched to their limits, his brothers reached further. They joined with him. They were one. A single will coursed through the Dreadknight’s sword arm.

  Ignoring his wound, Ku’gath grasped the pilot’s protective force field. He squeezed it as if he would shatter an egg. ‘Everything ends,’ he said. ‘Receive the gift of that truth.’

  The field crackled violet. Its integrity wavered. The flies broke through to the Dreadknight’s control linkages.

  And now the Dreadknight truly did roar. The collective battle cry of the squad shook the defiled walls of the Scouring Light. Gared twisted the greatsword and sawed upward through the huge torso of the daemon. All the other weapon systems shut down. All power, all faith, all will went to this single act: a great severing. And when all that strength was still not enough, when Ku’gath’s gelatinous form sought to re-form around the movement of the sword, Gared found yet more. His very identity became the severing. His blow fuelled itself with his very essence. He made of himself a burnt offering that he might have the strength for this great task.

  The greatsword moved, cutting the daemon in half. The semblance of muscle parted. The lie of bones crunched and snapped. Ku’gath screamed as the blade bisected his head.

  And as the abomination fell back, a butchered hillside that gibbered and flopped, and Gared fell into the dark, he felt the strength of the justicar still present. And Styer called, ‘Now!’

  To Grey Knights, to Saalfrank, to Furia and Brauner, the single word, the command to end it all.

  Now.

  And so it came: the great light of the ending.

  Epilogue

  The annihilating explosion of the Scouring Light swept the ork squadrons out of existence. It overwhelmed the void shields of the Tyndaris, but the critical regions of the hull retained their integrity. Crippled, many of its decks open to vacuum, or scoured by flame, the strike cruiser orbited a planet fallen to the green tide.

  It was a cold victory, and a silent one.

  It was still a victory.

  The Tyndaris’s primary teleport homer had locked on to the armour of the Grey Knights and the implanted transmitter in Furia’s augmetic arm. She had grasped Brauner at the last, and brought him over. They had even recovered the mutilated corpse of Borsam. His progenoid glands could be salvaged.

  A victory, then. Yes.

  Very cold. Very silent.

  Styer found Gared in the chapel. The Librarian wore his meditation robes. He kneeled before the great iron aquila, as still as the statues of the Brotherhood’s Champions that stood along the walls. Gared had been here since his release from the apothecarion. Styer had given him a full cycle before intruding.

  Gared looked up when he entered. He stood and joined Styer in the central aisle. His eyes were sunken. His face was shadowed, its lines deep. These were the signs of the more profound scars on his spirit.

  ‘Brother-justicar,’ Gared said. ‘How do we fare?’

  ‘Well enough, brother. For a becalmed ship.’

  ‘Are repairs possible?’

  ‘The most necessary are, yes.’

  ‘With its last citizen?’

  Styer nodded. ‘Brauner is now in Inquisitor Furia’s service.’

  ‘So he chose that path.’

  ‘No. She declared it. We took his choice from him when we left Squire’s Rest.’

  ‘You mean that I did.’

  Styer said nothing.

  Gared continued, ‘I have been reflecting on the prognostication.’

  ‘As have I.’ He had been wrestling with the event since their return. The insight, when it came, was a balm.

  ‘If their accuracy is because they are self-fulfilling prophecies…’

  Styer held up a hand. ‘Even if that is so, it is not cause for despair.’

  Gared’s smile was hollow but genuine. ‘Still doubting, I see.’

  Styer returned the grin. ‘That is my nature. The doubts remain, but their target changes.’ He turned serious. ‘But as I say, if it is true that our actions in some way contribute to the very incursion we must combat, then knowing this is itself a weapon against the Ruinous Powers.’

  ‘It is?’ Hope showed in Gared’s exhausted face.

  ‘Yes. We will use that insight to shape the battlefield in our favour.’

  Gared’s grin broadened, becoming hungry. ‘I am eager to put that tactic into practice.’

  ‘So am I, brother.’

  There was a debt owed. Styer’s squad had been manipulated. He would repay that insult a hundredfold.

  On that count, there would never be a doubt.

  At first, Gared wasn’t sure he had heard a whisper. It was too quiet, below the range detectable by his Lyman’s Ear. He was sure of this. He had not heard it. And yet it was insistent, stabbing into his consciousness like an assassin’s stiletto.

  I know you.

  The Grey Knights Epistolary jerked his head up as Justicar Styer appeared at the doorway to his meditation cell.

  ‘Your pardon, brother,’ Styer said. ‘I did not intend to startle you.’

  ‘You didn’t, justicar. But did you say something a moment ago?’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘You heard nothing as you approached?’

  ‘No.’ Styer’s expression darkened. His stance shifted, ready to take arms against an intruder. ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘A voice. Inaudible, it seems, but I heard it.’

  ‘Is there a presence aboard?’

  ‘I don’t think so. What I sensed was very faint.’

  ‘Even faint is ominous.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Neither the squad nor the strike cruiser Tyndaris were in a strong position. The struggle against orks and daemons in the Sanctus Reach had been punishing. The ship’s engines had only just become operational again. The Grey Knights were drained. In orbit over Squire’s Rest, aboard the Inquisition vessel Scouring Light, they had fought Ku’gath, the Plaguefather. It had been no small matter to banish the greater daemon from the materium. They had, in the end, incapacitated Ku’gath long enough for him to be caught in the cataclysmic explosion of the Scouring Light’s warp drive. The Grey Knights had teleported to the Tyndaris moments before the blast. Gared, piloting the Dreadknight, had poured much of his essence into the blow that had injured the material form of the daemon. He felt that the state of the Tyndaris reflected his own condition. He was healing in body and spirit, but he had a long way to go.

  ‘Do you believe an attack is under way or imminent?’ Styer asked.

  Gared hesitated. In the silence between Styer’s question and his response, the whisper without sound came again. I know you. A bit stronger. More insistent. It reached deeper into his being. It was hooked. It was clawed.

  ‘Yes,’ Gared said. ‘It is under way.’ There was another sound too, a distant buzz that at first he thought was a damaged cogitator. ‘Brother justicar, do you still sense nothing?’

  ‘No. You did just now?’

  Gared nodded. ‘It seems I am the target.’

  ‘Who is our enemy?’

  ‘I cannot tell yet.’ But the shape of the whisper was familiar. Gared had encountered it before, he was sure, but in another form.

  ‘You have sacrificed a great deal,’ said Styer, ‘but there is no rest for you yet.’

  ‘I will not waver in my duty.’

  ‘I know you won’t. However, circumstances compel me to give orders that may well make your struggle a more difficult one. We must leave the Sanctus Reach. The Tyndaris cannot survive a second encounter with a major ork fleet, and the augurs have detected a large number of ships on course for Squire’s Rest. We have also received word from Titan. Our intervention is required at Korzun. A brother is in need of aid.’

  ‘Are we warp-wort
hy?’

  ‘Shipmaster Saalfrank believes we are. Barely.’

  ‘There is some doubt about the Geller field?’

  ‘There is.’

  Gared took that in. If there were any weaknesses in the field, the ship and those aboard would be vulnerable to attack by warp entities while they were in the immaterium. If it failed altogether… He shrugged the speculation away. Nothing changed his duty or his will to fight. ‘Consider me forewarned, brother justicar,’ he said. ‘I am prepared.’

  ‘If you are being attacked, should you be alone?’

  ‘The foe is weak for the moment. Meditation will reinforce my defences.’

  ‘Very well. I will be on the bridge,’ Styer said, and left.

  Gared faced the depths of his cell once more. He gazed at the shrine that occupied the back wall. He concentrated on the golden skull at the centre, the icon of death that was the symbol of strength. He began to build a psychic wall. The whisperer would not find him an easy prey.

  He had barely begun when an image erupted in his mind. The attack was less in the content of the image than in its force. He stood on the surface of a planet, rocky, the vegetation sparse and brown. Four moons hung in the sky, turning night into a rich, deep twilight. He was at the bottom of a gorge. A wind keened, cold and leeching to his memory senses. To his left, a dark river rushed, shouting over rocks. Everything about the vision felt true. Yet the perspective was wrong. He was too low to the ground. It was over a metre closer than he was used to seeing it.

  Gared winced. This was a memory. As vivid as if he had stood in that place an hour ago. But it was a memory without context, disconnected from any other. He did not know what world this was.